but a man like dwight eisenhower understood that rollback, a strategy of preemptive war, would have huge costs and undergo huge consequences. and so he offered instead for a strategy called deterrence and containment. keep the soviet union in a box, put pressure on them so that they found it difficult to operate and maintain the deterrence that says to them, if you try to do something you your self will be annihilated -- yourself will be annihilated. remember the soviet union at the time was regarded as a wild, cazey, revolutionary power bent on global revolution. remember that stalin had just sacrificed tens of millions of his people in world war ii, in the eastern front. something that was unfathomable to western statesmen. they were routinely called irrational, crazy, wide-eyed, messianic. all the things you've heard about iran. but we learned that the proper course of action was not rollback and a preemptive war but containment and deterrence. then we had -- we watched this again in china. john kennedy feared that if china went nuclear, 25 countries would go nuclear. well, china did